Ukraine Brings the War Home — to Moscow

Ukraine penetrated Moscow’s air defenses on Sunday, launching the largest air attack against Russia’s capital since World War II. Columns of black smoke rose above the city as fires raged at Moscow’s refinery and at two oil pumping and storage stations. Kamikaze drones dive-bombed into two high-tech defense factories. Drone debris fell on a runway at Sheremetyevo, closing Russia’s busiest airport. A large fire burning below an eight-lane elevated highway caused a bridge to buckle six miles from the Kremlin. Throughout, Moscow residents watched from their high-rise apartments filming Ukrainian drones attacking their city. They ignored a new government ban, and flooded the Internet with videos of drones eluding anti-aircraft fire and exploding in industrial targets. In a touch of irony, the commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, Major Robert “Madyar” Brovdi, posted a photo of a drone wing painted in English: “Moscow Never Sleeps.” That was the title of a hit song and movie in the golden days of the Putin era. “Since three o’clock in the morning, air defense forces have been repelling a large-scale UAV attack on the capital region,” Governor Andrey Vorobyov of the Moscow region warned the metropolitan area’s 20 million residents in a Telegram post. He said three people were killed and at least four people were wounded.The assault, with hundreds of drones, was in revenge for Russia’s air attack on Ukraine on Thursday. That attack, the biggest to date on Kyiv, killed 24 people and wounded scores. Last week, Russian strikes killed 52 Ukrainian civilians and wounded another 346, President Volodymyr Zelensky said. Now, with Ukrainian workshops cranking out hundreds of long-range drones a day, Sunday’s attack on Russia’s most protected city may preview a new battlefront in the war: Russia’s political, economic, and press capital.“The war is, quite predictably, returning to its ‘native harbor,’” Mr. Zelensky said Sunday night in an address to Ukrainians. “The Russians need to focus on their own refineries, their own oil facilities, and their own businesses, rather than on how to disrupt the lives of other nations.” Claiming that Ukrainian drones increasingly outsmart Moscow’s air defenses, he posted on X: “We are clearly telling the Russians: their state must end its war.” He said drone flights to Moscow from Ukraine are the equivalent of 300 miles. Ukraine’s State Security Service, author of several of the attacks, said: “These strikes demonstrate that even the most heavily defended Moscow region is not safe.”The Moscow refinery was the latest of 10 major Russian refineries to suffer major damage from Ukrainian drones over the last six weeks, according to a Reuters tally posted this morning. As Ukrainian rockets and drones now strike 1,000 miles into Russia, Russians are growing uneasy. A poll conducted two weeks ago showed that Russian respondents are more concerned about strikes close to home than about the fight on the distant battlefront. Conducted by the Kremlin-aligned Public Opinion Foundation, the poll found that 18 percent were most interested in attacks on Russian territory, compared to 16 percent who cited battlefront developments in Ukraine. Half of respondents said the war, now in its fifth year, is making them “anxious.” This is slightly higher than in August 2024, when Ukraine occupied a corner of Russian territory, in the Kursk region. To allay fears, Russia’s defense ministry said it shot down 1,000 drones during a 24-hour period ending Sunday. Moscow officials said local air defenses shot down 120 drones. Mayor Sergei Sobyanin posted on Telegram 30 times in 24 hours about air defense shooting down drones. He concluded: “Minor damage has been recorded at the sites where debris fell.” However, videos posted on the Internet show slow moving drones leisurely moving across Moscow skies, unaffected by the occasional crackle of gunfire from the ground. One video shows an anti-aircraft rocket crashing to the ground shortly after launch. Around Moscow on Sunday, Ukraine’s successful targets were largely industrial: Angstrem, a company which produces microchips for high-precision weapons; Raduga, a missile component factory; the Moscow Refinery; and Solnechnogorsk and Volodarsk, two pumping stations crucial for a fuel pipeline ringing Moscow. “To the sound of Eurovision songs, the Kyiv regime, financed by the EU, carried out yet another mass terrorist attack,” Russia’s spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, told TASS, referring to the Saturday night finale of the European song festival.Some Ukrainian missiles and drones seem to have gone awry, hitting houses and at least one high-rise apartment building. “The hit was so powerful that it almost knocked me out [of bed], and I weigh a lot. I opened my window and saw smoke rising,” a 39-year-old resident of the Moscow suburb of Putilkovo where a high-rise was damaged, Konstantin, told Agence France-Presse. Ukraine’s defense ministry was not apologetic, posting on social media: “The war is returning to where it came from.”

Ukraine Brings the War Home — to Moscow

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